Negative Space: science
- Another victim of climate change: science reporting
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The needs of religious reporting are completely different from the needs of science reporting. Treating climate change as a religion is killing science reporting. If we’re not careful, it will kill science as well.
- Cargo Cult Science
- “When you have put a lot of ideas together to make an elaborate theory, you want to make sure, when explaining what it fits, that those things it fits are not just the things that gave you the idea for the theory; but that the finished theory makes something else come out right, in addition.”
Richard Feynman’s famous “cargo cult science”, adapted from the Caltech commencement address given in 1974. Rescued from Donald Simanek’s home page.
- Does government funding hold science back?
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Abundant government funding for research probably has the effect of dividing research into crazy and conventional, with little in between for innovative.
- Global warming vs. oiled dolphins
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Catastrophic anthropogenic global warming critics are more dangerous than oil execs who kill dolphins, and need to be buried deeper than two million year old bones. But this makes CAGW a non-science. Science requires criticism or it isn’t science. Science-oriented media outlets are doing CAGW scientists a disservice by protecting them from competing theories.
- I believe in Global Warming (and other conversion stories)
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Conversion stories aren’t meant to convert skeptics; they’re a bonding tale for the converted, a sign of a religion; science needs theories that make predictions about what happens when they’re right and how to falsify them if they’re wrong. Proof for human-caused global warming is always whatever happened last month or last year, never tomorrow. No application of the scientific method can ever disprove it because hindsight is 20/20.
- Orion spacecraft makes successful test flight
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Feminists complain it wasn’t wearing sensible shoes.
- The scientific creed
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If science is your religion, you have chosen the hardest religion of all. If science is your religion, you don’t prove yourself right. You prove yourself wrong.
- Usenet
- Usenet is the AM radio of the information highway. When people talk about the discussion groups on the net, they’re usually talking about Usenet.
- The Vision of the Anointed
- Would you believe that good intentions can defy the law of gravity? If not, you wouldn’t make a good politician in today’s America.
More Information
- Richard Feynman on Scientific Method (1964)
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“If it disagrees with experiment, it’s *wrong*. In that simple statement is the key to science. It doesn’t make any difference how beautiful your guess is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are who made the guess, or what his name is… If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong. That’s all there is to it.”
- How our botched understanding of ‘science’ ruins everything
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“Intellectuals of all persuasions love to claim the banner of science. A vanishing few do so properly.”
- Spin, Strangeness, and Charm
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“Politics, media bias, science, and psychology.”
- Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!•
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In Surely You’re Joking, Richard Feynman takes us through the dawn of modern physics—from Los Alamos to Caltech. As part of that he shows us the rigorously playful requirements of the scientific method.
